When Seth Meyers took over NBC’s Late Night franchise from Jimmy Fallon in 2014, all eyes were on the 8G Band, the show’s new house band that stepped into the vacancy left behind by the Roots. Fronted by Meyers’s former SNL colleague Fred Armisen, the collective — consisting of guitarist Seth Jabour, bassist Syd Butler, keyboardist Eli Janney, and, at the time, drummer Kimberly Thompson — proved to be more than capable. Since then, Armisen’s appearances on the show have grown more sporadic (he drops in for a week here and there), but Jabour, Butler, and Janney have been permanent fixtures alongside Meyers for 11 seasons.
But when season 12 of the show begins airing in September, it will be without its signature band. In a June 11 interview, associate musical director Janney indicated to Vulture that, at the conclusion of Late Night With Seth Meyers’s current season, the show will undergo a “revamp” for budgetary reasons, and the 8G band will be let go. A second source close to the show has confirmed this news, which arrives amid wider cutbacks at the network and industry at large. In January, NBC News laid off between 50 to 100 employees, and Paramount Global laid off 800 employees the following month.
Ten years on any television show is nevertheless a long time, and Janney is full of positive reflections on the experience. He equates the opportunity to work a “union gig” where he got to make music every day to winning the lottery: “I thought I was going to get fired every week. To make it ten and a half years is pretty amazing.”
When and how did you first get the news that Late Night would be letting the band go?
Basically Seth Meyers and Mike Shoemaker, the showrunner, brought us in in person to talk about it. They expressed their regret and frustration about it. They had been trying to work it out for months, but in the end NBC was adamant about where they wanted the budget to go. It’s not just the band; there’s a whole crew that works with the band, so there’s a lot of people employed. I think this was an easy way for them to cut the budget. Easy is not the right word.
There’s a lot of strong emotions. No one is happy about it. Seth has been a big champion of ours from the get-go. They couldn’t have been nicer about it. They told us probably about a month ago — maybe six weeks. That’s a good more than 90 days to figure out what’s next for us, so that’s pretty nice.
Have you talked about how the show is going to address the change?
I’m not part of that discussion. I know that we’ll have Fred drumming with us for the last week, and there’ll be a little bit of a celebration, I’m sure. There’s been a bunch of ideas floated, but nothing has been written in stone yet. It’s also just a sad day for Late Night, because it’s been going for over 40 years now. But, sadly, it’s the reality of broadcast and a shrinking market — streaming eating into this, and YouTube eating into that. Streaming is not making money, either. So budgets everywhere have been cut and cut and cut. I liken it to a Spotify moment in music, where suddenly it’s like, Nobody wants to pay for music. Music gets devalued.
Presumably the show will still have walk-on music. Do you know what the plan is to replace the band?
We’re still going to make music for them, but we just won’t be playing it live. So that will continue. That’s one nice thing they’ve worked out. We’re just going to record a whole bunch of them and then update it periodically to keep things fresh. So that’ll be super fun, actually.
Has there been talk at all about bringing the band back for a week here and there the way Fred Armisen periodically comes back for a week these days?
We haven’t talked about that, but I’m sure it’s in their mind. It’s possible.
Have you heard anything else about how the budget cuts are going to affect the show?
Not really, but I wouldn’t, because my job is writing and executing the show’s music every day. But I think that itself is going to be a pretty crazy change. I’m not sure they’ve totally worked it out either. Doing a daily show gives you the flexibility of trying stuff out, so their format can change pretty quickly. Everyone’s used to working quickly. We write all this music and then perform it that day. It’s an awesome kind of madness that I will miss.
What are you and the band hoping to do in the next few months while you’re still there?
It’s almost freeing in a way, because we can try all kinds of things. We’re just having some of our favorite drummers back in the guest-drummer program, and we’ll have Fred back. Everybody knows what’s happening, and everybody’s a little bit sad about it, but we’re trying to go out on a positive note. That’s mainly what we’re doing: Trying to enjoy the time we have.
Are you supposed to be talking about this publicly?
I don’t think so. But what are they going to do, fire me again? But also, I have nothing but positive things to say. Ten and a half years is a very long time on TV. Every TV show ends; that’s just the reality of any creative endeavor. It’s been ten of the best years of my life. They always really took care of us and let us do what we wanted. They never really restricted it that much.
I’m definitely going to miss it, but I don’t have any animosity towards the show. Those guys have been taking care of us over the years in such an outrageous way. During the pandemic, we figured out a way to do it from home, and during the strike, they really took care of us.
What does it feel like to have written and performed so much music that lives and dies ephemerally with each show?
We talked about making an album, but it was legally so complicated that we ended up passing on that. But there is something about remaining as close to the moment as you can. It’s almost like a jazz performance, where you go up there and there’s a musical conversation happening onstage. We get together in the morning or around noon, and we write a bunch of songs, and then we perform them. But we always have to stay on our toes, because things change minute by minute.
As we have these guest drummers come in — I think we’re closing in on 300 drummers, which is so fun and amazing and has got to be some kind of record — I try to prep them for the show, and I say, “Other than the opening theme, which has to be the same every night, everything else is very loose. We can do whatever we want.” Our job is to keep the energy up in the room in between the acts and entertain the audience, and the best way for us to do that is to create it in the moment and have that musical conversation on set. There’s a special thing about that. It’s almost like Broadway, where there is kind of a script, because we wrote the songs earlier, but at the same time, you’re reacting to the energy from the audience. It’s very ephemeral, because the next day, we have to do five new songs, or seven new songs, depending on the day. There’s something magical about that.
As much as this is bad news, It seems like you’re using this as an opportunity to reflect back on the past ten years.
Absolutely. This was an amazing opportunity that I did not see coming … Talk about a fourth act. My God, it couldn’t have been better: a union gig where you get paid to create music every day. It was a little bit like winning the lottery. I thought I was going to get fired every week, so to make it ten and a half years is pretty amazing.
I have nothing bad to say about anyone here, and that’s rare. We have 200 people working here, and everybody’s been great. Sometimes we get substitute crew people Saturday Night Live or The Tonight Show, and everyone is like, “It’s so fucking mellow here. Everyone is so nice.” I’m like, “Yeah, why would you not do it that way?”
